How to measure a clients heart rate during exercise

There will be many situations where you will need to assess your clients heart rate during exercise. This may be needed when the machine’s heart rate monitor isn’t working (a frequent problem at my local gym) or the client doesn’t have a wearable heart rate monitor.

One thing to keep in mind is that you do not want to disturb your client for too long so taking a 60 second reading is out of the question. When you need to measure your clients pulse during an exercise, you can count the number of beats in 6 seconds and add a zero to that number. By adding the zero this will provide you with an estimate of the number of beats that would have been recorded in a 60 second time span. The second method would be to multiply the number recorded by 10. This will also provide you with a close enough estimate and should come out to the same number.

Example: Number of beats in 6 seconds = 15. Adding a zero = 150. This will give you a pulse rate of 150 bpm or, 15 x 10 = 150